The neighbors of Franklin Dunn heard he had gone to the doctor for a stress test and was kept for heart bypass surgery.

The neighbors of Franklin Dunn heard he had gone to the doctor for a stress test and was kept for heart bypass surgery.

Before he could be taken to surgery, the neighbors had three eight-row cotton strippers and a four-row stripper in his 165-acre cotton field northeast of Lubbock, and were harvesting his crop.

The work was in the evening before weather meteorologists had forecast rain to begin at midnight.

“It was completed about 30 or 40 minutes before it started raining,” said Carey McKinney, a farmer who also operates Liberty Gin.

Linda Williams said Dunn has farmed in the New Deal and Idalou communities for many years. “His family has farmed there, and he’s farmed there. He would have done that for anybody else — that’s how the farmers do, they just try to take care of each other.”

The farmers who did the harvesting, left their own crops to gather Dunn’s cotton, McKinney said.

After the rain, however, the equipment had to be left in the field until it dried.

Williams said,

“Carey is the one who got everybody together. He said, ‘That’s the way I was raised.’”

Dunn’s well-known in the community. He was a county commissioner at one time and has served on school boards.

McKinney said Dunn was providing much of the 24-hour care his wife requires. Family and others are filling in while he convalesces.

Ricky Dunn, Franklin’s son, said his father is recovering well.

“We had no idea they were going to come. We were standing there visiting with the doctors about what they were going to do, and all of a sudden my little brother got a call from Carey at the gin. Carey asked if the cotton was ready to strip near the house. When he asked why, Carey said, ‘Because a bunch of eight-row strippers are headed that way.’

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